A Heuristic for Task Work

My rule of thumb for Task work – and one I highly recommend Teams adopt as a part of their Team Working Agreement – is as follows: Every Team Member’s name appears on one and only one in-progress, unblocked Task at a time.

This rule does not preclude multiple Team Members from working on the same Task. It does preclude any Team Member from signing up for or attempting to work on more than one Task at time. And that’s the point. Single-item flow is the most effective, most efficient way known to develop a product.

This example (partial) task board shows the task heuristic in operation

The result of this simple rule is that no one is working on more than one Task at once, meaning no one is attempting to engage in multitasking. Another result of this simple rule is that Tasks not yet in progress are available, by virtue of the fact that they live in the To Do column on the Task Board, for any Team Member to work on, until one or more Team Members sign up for the Task. This simple visual cue helps the Team see what needs to be worked on and also helps drive cross-functional behavior on the Team by making it physically possible for anyone to sign up for any available Task.

Excerpt from The Agile Team Handbook, page 139.

 All for now....

 ..._._

Visualizing Cross-functionality with a Team Spectrograph

Cross-functionality is a key characteristic of agile teams. The benefits of cross-functionality are well-known, so I won't go into that here. But how can you tell if your team is cross-functional? How can you help your team become more cross-functional? How can you tell if you're making progress? All good questions. Fortunately, there is an answer.

Cross-functionality within a team doesn't just happen, it has to be deliberately and thoughtfully nurtured. So let's live the principle of Transparency and make it visible! A tool that I have found highly effective is the Team Spectrograph. A spectrograph plots amplitude against a segment of the radio-frequency spectrum. We can do the same thing with team skills, that is, plot the skill levels team members possess (the amplitude) across the spectrum of skill sets the team needs to have.

Here's how it works. On a white board or tear sheet, draw a standard x-y graph. On the x-axis, list the skill sets the team needs in order to deliver the work it is being asked to do, each skill representing a tic mark along the x-axis. On the y-axis, draw evenly spaced tic marks from 1 to 10, with zero represented by the baseline of the graph. Then, have each team member self-assess his or her skill level on that one-to-ten scale across all of the skill sets depicted. Have each team member use a different color marker and voila! - you have a team spectrograph that captures your team's cross-functionality as of that moment in time.

The example above depicts a team that is well-balanced across the needed skill sets, but lacks cross-functionality. The independent, non-overlapping peaks represent skill silos within the team.
















This example depicts a team that is completely lacking the "Docs" skill set.

Using the Team Spectrograph to Grow Cross-functionality
Now that you can take a snapshot of team cross-functionality, you can take a new snapshot at a team Retrospective every three months, for example, to see progress and indicate areas where the team needs to focus on extending its cross-functionality. Using the first spectrograph above as a starting point, the following four depict the conscious development of team cross-functionality over the course of a year.

After three months...















After six months...















After nine months...















A year later...















Notice how all of the lines have come off the bottom of the graph indicating that every team member has at least some level of skill in each area. Notice also that the many skill areas have pegged the spectrograph. A side effect of transferring skills throughout a team is generally the enhancement of core competencies among team members. In order to teach someone else, we have to get better at what we already do best.

Team members can use their Team Spectrograph as a reminder to focus on techniques that build cross-functional skill sets, pair programming being the single most effective one I know of. The Team Spectrograph is also a reminder that cross-functionality doesn't just happen - teams grow and nurture their cross-functionality deliberately - one task at a time.

Another benefit of the Team Spectrograph is that it points out individual skills other team members were unaware of. Now that the full range of skills team members possess is visible, the team can take full advantage of its extant cross-functionality.

All for now....

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Updated:
I will be presenting this topic at the Atlanta Scrum Gathering, May 7-9! We'll have fun learning more about cross-functionality and building a real Team Spectrograph!

Good teams are like good code: Highly Cohesive, Loosely Coupled

The best Scrum teams I've worked with have been reflections of the code they produced: highly cohesive -- meaning focused on a project or product -- and loosely coupled -- having minimal direct dependencies on other teams. Like excellent code, excellent Scrum teams don't just happen; it takes careful planning and continuous attention to detail.

Let's start with high cohesion. The highest performing Scrum teams are initially built around a purpose, a specific project or product, and allowed to focus exclusively on that project or product. But after that the team's design is emergent, adapting to changing circumstances and increased knowledge about teamwork, the domain, and the product. Like a well-designed class, the team is directed at its purpose and resists attempts to redirect it. Once the current project or product is complete, the team can take on a new project or product, just like a cohesive class can be instantiated repeatedly. The key is that, like a cohesive class, the team is focused.

Great Scrum teams are also loosely coupled to other teams. What this means is that a great team has very few dependencies on other teams, that is, the team can complete its work without waiting on outside experts or the work of other teams. I can already hear the objections: "Okay, so a great team contains all of the skills and knowledge needed to complete its own work, fine. How can you keep even the best team from waiting on other teams to complete their work?" Okay everyone, turn your eyes to the Product Owners in the room.

A great team must have a great Product Owner. The best Product Owners ensure that their team's backlog is independent of the backlogs of other teams. Even more, a great team of Product Owners can decouple the backlogs of all teams to the maximum extent possible, ensuring that all of their teams, like all of the objects in a well-designed application, only access each other through well-defined interfaces that minimize dependencies.

The next time you survey your organization's Scrum teams, think like a software architect and work on making your teams highly cohesive and loosely coupled!

All for now....

...-.-

Don't be like Homer Simpson

"In times of trouble, go with what you know."
--Homer Simpson

Words of wisdom from a notoriously brainless cartoon character seem like an oxymoron -- and in fact that is the case. Unfortunately, Homer's prescription is something I experience over and over again with client organizations. In the midst of a difficult and challenging change, like moving the organization from a sequential development process to Scrum, there is strong temptation to fall back on old habits of mind. Whenever things get uncomfortable, whenever Scrum makes a long-standing problem unbearable, the knee-jerk reaction is to ditch the part of Scrum that "caused" the problem and revert to a previously learned behavior.

One example I have experienced repeatedly is the problems caused by a widely distributed Scrum team, that is, one with some team members in North America while others are in China or India. I recently ran across an issue in which the more experienced North American team members were attempting to work with freshly minted graduates in China who lacked even the slightest shred of domain knowledge. Since the time shift in this case was exactly 12 hours, it was impossible for the team members to work together closely. Not only were there twice-daily hand offs of code between team members in the different geographies, there was also the issue of the Chinese team members lack of experience in the domain.

The response from the domain-expert team members in North America was to clamp down process on their young Chinese peers. Over time, many gates had been constructed to prevent the Chinese team members from doing any damage to the code base. By the time I arrived on the scene, the gates were so restrictive that the Chinese side of the team -- and make no mistake, each geography had taken sides -- was unable to do any work at all. Even the simplest tasks were impossible to complete without involving the North American side because of the gating requirements.

A better solution, which the organization actually implemented, was to create separate North American and Chinese teams. While this by itself did not solve the bigger issue of domain knowledge being restricted to the North American team, it did allow both teams to work with a degree of independence and to finish the work they committed to each Sprint. The one major adjustment was to have the Chinese team work in one-week Sprints while the North American team worked in two-week Sprints. Shorter Sprints forced the Chinese team to break its work down into very small bites that the North American domain experts could then help with during the short window of overlapping availability each day. By limiting the range of variability -- implementing one-week Sprints -- the organization was able to move forward with new feature development much more quickly than had been the case with a distributed team and a multiplicity of gates for the Chinese team members' work to pass through. The organization also unknowingly implemented one of W. Edwards Deming's credos, that of changing the system to reduce variability. More on that topic in a later post....

All for now....

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Got a Morale Problem? Get Quality!

The connection between product quality and morale isn't a big mystery, but it seems to be one that is frequently overlooked. W. Edwards Deming and, somewhat later, Frederick Herzberg famously linked the sense of accomplishment people experience when doing good work on projects over which they are able to control how the work is done with high morale. Scrum's emphasis on delivering a working product increment at the end of each Sprint fits into the morale equation perfectly.

So what's the problem?

We don't always do as we should. When teams are pushed to take on more work than they can competently deliver, quality is the inevitable casualty. Teams that find more and more of their capacity sucked away by bug-fixing rapidly experience significant, sometimes catastrophic, declines in morale. With morale goes innovation, productivity, and continuity as people seek to flee the bug storm.

An even worse situation occurred in one company's misguided attempt to focus on its defect backlog while at the same time delivering new features at their accustomed pace. The solution they settled on was to create a bug-fixing "team" -- actually a large work group -- that would, in essence, clean up the messes left by the over-worked feature group. Freed from the responsibility for the quality of their work, the feature group delivered a large number of features. Unfortunately, the feature group's freedom from responsibility produced a product strangled by defects which the poor souls on the bug-fixing work group couldn't hope to save. Both sides blamed the other for the rotten product quality and morale throughout the company hit absolute rock-bottom. An attempt to introduce Scrum into this situation failed because of the maelstrom of blame, mistrust, horrible morale, and fear of change.

The highest morale I have had the privilege to share in occurred on Scrum teams that were allowed to play by the rules of Scrum: only pulling in the work that the team members could commit to, failing tests were simply an indication of "not done," and nothing that was "not done" ever saw the light of day. The company provided adequate support for continuous integration, TDD, refactoring, and other good engineering practices, which allowed the teams to work without fear of unintended consequences. When a bug did surface, as bugs inevitably will, the team that produced it was responsible both for the fix and the tests to prove the fix. The teams in this organization felt the same degree of ownership and satisfaction when fixing bugs as when developing new features. In short, their morale was in the stratosphere. Their quality was also spectacular.

So the next time you notice one or more teams suffering from poor morale, work on quality. Fix the quality problem and the response to an inquiry about morale will almost certainly be "what morale problem?"

All for now....

...-.-

Is it a Group or a Team?

This question often occurs to me when I'm on training or coaching assignments. The provocation is usually a statement similar to the following: "We have a development team of 250 highly skilled engineers...." or "Our QA team just can't seem to keep up with development...." or "The business analysis team writes all of our requirements...." or "Our middleware team serves multiple simultaneous projects."

It is common usage to apply the term "team" to mean any collection of individuals who perform some related function, regardless of how those individuals actually work. To me, a team is a very specific type of human organizational unit, defined by how it works, rather than by what it works on. Simply put, teams are distinguished by teamwork. I have even, very occasionally, encountered fair approximations of cross-functional Scrum "teams" that fail to meet this most basic definition.

Teamwork describes a particular way of working toward a shared goal. I have distilled the essential characteristics of teamwork into the following (incomplete) list:

• sublimation of individual ego and need for recognition to the needs of the team
  
• sharing and balancing workload dynamically at daily or finer granularity
  
• individuals offering and requesting help in an environment of trust
• willingness to make personal sacrifices in support of the team
• recognition that the team's goal outweighs (but does not exclude) individual goals
  

I'm certain there are many more traits that one could apply to describe teamwork, but this works for me as a starting point for the discussion. The key distinction I see between a team and a group is the collaborative effort a team engages in to meet its collective goal, for example, a Sprint commitment. A group, on the other hand, may indeed consist of skilled, well-intentioned individuals, but without a collaborative framework and a collective goal, teamwork is absent. The common example is the group of developers, each individually working on their assigned tasks, head down, blinders on, either unable or unwilling to share the load with their fellow group members. Sure, they're all working toward the same end point, but on parallel tracks that by their very nature cannot converge. Group work results in the standard array of dysfunctions and failures that characterize traditional software projects.

Implied in my list of teamwork traits is a self-organizing, empowered team that has the authority to set its own commitments and determine how best to meet those commitments. Another implication is that a team is small. The standard Scrum guideline for team size (seven plus/minus two) has always worked brilliantly in my coaching experience.

So the next time you hear a client or colleague talking about a "team," make sure you know what they really mean: Is it a Team or a Group?

All for now....

...-.-